Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Mike Rugg is has a long history with Bigfooting. He is owner/curator of the Bigfoot Discovery Museum in Felton, CA. He has been doing research on the subject for over half a century. Through his museum he attempts to educate the public at large about the probability of bigfoot and the current best guesses as to its habits and its place in the natural world. He is also involved in field studies as he has discovered that the local mountains have a history of bigfoot sightings beginning in the 1870’s and continuing to the present day. he also hosts the annual Bigfoot Discovery Days.

Hunting for Bigfoot in the Santa Cruz Mountains

When I found out I’d be going Bigfoot hunting with Michael Rugg, I figured we’d hike deep into the woods to some remote destination to conduct our search. In actuality, we spend most of the time in Felton, right along the road and close to the nearby homes.

“Bigfoots don’t have to be in a big wilderness area to exist,” Rugg, who owns the Bigfoot Discovery Museum, explains to me on our outing. “They can exist around the edge of town.”

I meet up with the crew at Taqueria Vallarta in Felton, where we eat tacos and wait for the sun to go down before heading out the crew’s usual spots. The first place is partway up a winding road in a neighborhood where Rugg says he’s gotten several reports of Bigfoot sightings. We park in a dark space between two homes and settle in, and I get a chance to get to know the team.

Rugg, the undisputed leader, has a commanding presence despite his small stature and calm voice. At 66, with a gray beard and full head of gray hair, he’s surprisingly energetic and passionate. Ralph Jack, who has been working with Rugg since 2006, is a funny, happy-go-lucky guy with long hair and a thick California accent. Jack says he was actually a prospector in his younger days, and that he owned a landscaping business until recently. In stark contrast is Ashley Membree, a Cabrillo College student in her early twenties who’s been volunteering at the museum in her spare time for a few months.

Bigfoot hunting, it turns out, involves a lot of sitting and waiting. Membree holds a boom mic and headphones, aiming it at the nearby mountain range. Jack has a camcorder and audio tape recorder on constant record, just in case. Rugg looks at different pockets of trees with a pair of night vision binoculars.

Rugg explains to me that normally they go out much later in the night, usually starting around 11pm, when all the people and cars have quieted down. But even late, he tells me, they detect very little activity most nights.

“We have some Bigfoots down here (in Santa Cruz County) that are real people-savvy. They’ve been hanging around us for years and they know how to get around us,” Rugg explains.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t successful nights. Earlier at the museum, Rugg played me two audio clips. The first was recorded at the Forest of Nisene Marks State Park in Aptos three years ago. It starts out with a group of coyotes howling. Then something else, a totally different high-pitched howl, arises in the background. It gets louder and quieter and louder again, lasting a minute and a half.

The second clip also starts out with a bunch of coyotes, but in the middle of their howling, something—it sounds like a gorilla—grunts.

Rugg shows me video from the night of the first clip. They had gone to this particular spot because someone had called them up and told them that they’d recently seen signs of a Bigfoot. Jack, of course, recorded the whole evening on the camcorder. As they were walking they caught a pungent odor and heard that high-pitched howl. Later, when they walked back to that same spot, the odor was gone. They determined that meant the odor was transient and couldn’t have been coming from a rotting animal carcass. The way they figured it, that smell came from something on the move.

When they later watched the video, they saw in the distance a blurry figure moving between two trees. When Rugg shows me the footage it’s hard to tell what the image is, but clearly it’s something moving. Because of all these factors—the howl, the smell, the report of a sighting and the footage itself—Rugg believes they taped a Bigfoot.

Of course, he also realizes that this isn’t the kind of thing to make any public announcements over. They need something bigger.

“We’ve been sitting back quietly collecting evidence, building a database, going out and testing stuff, watching what everybody else is doing and realizing all the mistakes that are being made and all the crap that is going on,” Rugg says.

It annoys Rugg that other members of the Bigfoot community, some of whom he’s friends with, make public statements of having found evidence when it’s only circumstantial. But, as Rugg notes, these are the people getting the funding, while The Bigfoot Discovery Museum struggles every year to keep the doors open.

Refuge for Believers

When Michael Rugg was 4 years old, he saw something that forever changed his life. It happened on a family camping trip near the Eel River in Humboldt County, after he had wandered off into the woods alone. Here’s how he describes it:

“As soon as I turned, there was this great big man. We made eye contact. There was nothing threatening about it. I was just awestruck because I had no frame of reference for this thing. I heard my parents screaming, ‘Mikey, where are you?’ So I ran back. I told them, ‘Come see the big hairy man.’ We went running back over there and it was gone. My parents looked around and said, ‘Don’t worry, it was probably just a tramp.’ Well, that was the weirdest tramp I’ve ever seen.”

That was in 1950, one year before reports of Yeti were coming out of the Himalayas and eight years before reports of Bigfoots were being published in the Humboldt Times.

Now, 62 years later, Rugg has spent his life searching for indisputable evidence that Bigfoot exists. He’s never had another face-to-face sighting like that first experience, though not from a lack of trying. While most of Rugg’s time has gone into research, he has made several trips back up to Northern California to find another Bigfoot. And for the last eight years, Rugg has gone Bigfoot hunting nearly every night here in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

In 2004, Rugg turned his Bigfoot obsession into a Bigfoot business. Located on Main Street in Felton, the Bigfoot Discovery Museum occupies a small unassuming building with several wooden Bigfoot statues out front. The front part of the museum is set up like a roadside attraction, packed with toys, comic books and album covers. The second half is more of a research center, loaded with newspaper clippings, video clips, books, skulls and other items Rugg believes point to the existence of Bigfoot.

But the real treasure in the museum is Rugg. He’s a walking Bigfoot encyclopedia.

“There are few people on the planet that have thought about Bigfoot as much as I have,” Rugg says.

At the Bigfoot Discovery Museum, I watch as Rugg tells his visitors about his Bigfoot encounter and eagerly answers all their Bigfoot questions. He isn’t lying when he says he’s an expert on the subject.

“I heard something about Patterson giving a deathbed confession,” one guest remarks, referring to the infamous grainy 1967 footage Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin shot of a hairy lumbering creature they claimed was a Bigfoot.

“That’s a common myth,” Rugg responds. “Neither man have claimed it was a hoax. I’ve met Robert Gimlin. He’s never made a nickel off that film. Still, to this day he swears he watched his buddy film a Bigfoot.”

One of the first things Rugg explains to me is that many people come to the museum because they’ve had a Bigfoot experience, or maybe even a paranormal encounter of some sort. They have no one to talk about it with, and they’re afraid their friends and family will laugh at them.

“I hear their stories. I don’t put down witnesses. They can come in and tell me the sky is red and I’ll listen to them. The museum serves a psychiatric purpose,” Rugg says.

It doesn’t take more than a couple of hours before I see exactly what Rugg is talking about. A couple in their early thirties comes into the museum, and the guy tells Rugg he saw a Bigfoot seven years earlier in Big Basin. He’s kept this experience a secret from everyone in his life except his girlfriend for fear of being ridiculed.

Rugg patiently listens to a detailed account of the sighting, then tells the man about other such sightings in the Santa Cruz Mountains and comments on how similar their descriptions of Bigfoot have been to his.

“I didn’t know other people were seeing Bigfoots out here,” the man says, clearly feeling better.

“We’re advocates for eye-witnesses,” Rugg tells me later. “We’re saying people that claim that they’ve seen little green men and stuff like that might be telling the truth. How can you be so goddamn sure they didn’t?”

Hairy Situation

It’s not surprising this topic gets Rugg riled up. He’s had his fair share of negative experiences for being so candid about his belief in Bigfoot. The one experience that angers him the most, he says, happened in the mid-1960s when he was a student at Stanford. Rugg wanted to write his final paper for a physical anthropology class on Bigfoot. The professor objected, telling Rugg point blank that Bigfoot wasn’t real. Rugg, of course, insisted, and the professor told him he could write the paper so long as he provided a bibliography that didn’t include True Magazine or Argosy, both popular pulp magazines of the ’60s.

Rugg went to work with a vengeance, turning in a 38-page tome with a four-page bibliography instead of the required seven pages total. He got a C and a note saying, “I don’t think you’ve made a case. This is still in the realm of UFOs.”

Forty years later, Rugg still deals with people’s teasing and harassing.

“I get the one-finger salute quite often walking down the street,” Rugs says. “People driving by, they flip me off and yell, ‘Bigfoot sucks!’ I’ve had people stuff notes in the door saying, ‘Good luck with your scam.’ I’ve had rocks heaved at the museum.”

He hopes at least that he can help other people dealing with these sorts of things by making his museum a sanctuary for people with experiences of the unexplainable.

“People have been talking about sentient beings that they come in contact with that seem to be coming from some other place or reality for centuries. It sounds crazy. It sounds impossible. So those people are shoved aside. They’re marginalized. They’re considered to be nutcases and some of them end up in insane asylums,” says Rugg. “I think some of them have had genuine events that we don’t understand. I’m not going to call those people all fools and liars.”

Rugg isn’t without people anxious to help him keep the museum alive. One of them is Kepi Ghoulie, former lead singer for the pop-punk band the Groovie Ghoulies, who were famous for singing songs about ghosts, vampires and, yes, Bigfoots. Three years ago, Ghoulie put together a fundraising concert at the Bigfoot Museum with several bands. The year after that, he held it at the Crepe Place. While he couldn’t do one last year, he is tentatively planning to do one this year in August.

“I love the museum,” Ghoulie says. “I love Michael. I love the idea of it. I love roadside America. I want to do whatever I can to keep that thing stay open. I love having faith or belief in magic or whatever you want to call it. Why not? If you want to believe, then you can go to the Bigfoot Museum.”

Going Against The Grainy

Avid discussion of sasquatches isn’t anything new. People have been talking about large hairy bipeds hiding in the woods for hundreds of years. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that Bigfoot reports made the mainstream media and had people all over the world talking about them. In 1967, footage dubbed the Patterson Film was shot in the mountains of Northern California allegedly capturing an actual Bigfoot walking through the woods. Whether the film was a hoax or the real thing is a subject of great controversy. But there’s no question in Rugg’s mind. He has the footage playing on an iMac in the museum on continuous repeat.

“I accept that film as a type specimen. To me that’s as good as a dead one on a slab. It’s still the single best piece of evidence for Bigfoot,” Rugg says.

But Rugg understands that this footage alone isn’t good enough for everyone. He hopes to find actual DNA evidence, which he’d like to see tested, vetted and written about in a scientific journal so he can end the Bigfoot debate once and for all. He says he’s confident this will happen, and whether he’s the person to do it or someone else doesn’t matter, just so long as it happens in his lifetime. In fact, Rugg announced a couple years back that he would not cut his hair till someone proves Bigfoot’s existence.

The decision to open the museum and devote 100 percent of his time to Bigfoot came after a brief stint in the corporate world. After graduating Stanford in 1968 with a degree in art history, Rugg spent most of his life living like a bohemian, selling handmade dulcimers and doing freelance graphic design work to make ends meet. But in 1997 he landed a lucrative full-time position doing graphic design for Cintara, a brand building company in Silicon Valley. In 2000, when the dot-com bubble burst, he, like a lot of people, was out of work. He spent a couple years re-evaluating his life.

“I came to what you might call a mid-life crisis. I was getting older. I didn’t want my headstone to say, ‘He was another idiot that chased Bigfoot.’ I want it to say, ‘He told you so,’” Rugg says.

In other words, Bigfoot could no longer be a part-time pursuit. From that point on he would eat, sleep and dream Bigfoot.

One thing Rugg hadn’t counted on was that he would meet so many people that had seen Bigfoots in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Rugg writes down every story people tell him about a Bigfoot sighting in Santa Cruz County. He has a large map in his museum and puts pins at the locations of the most compelling sightings.

One former Santa Cruz resident, Colette Alexander, told Rugg she saw a Bigfoot in 1999 up Highway 9, just one mile from downtown Santa Cruz. She related her story to me.

“I was eating lunch with a friend. I looked over into the bushes and I saw this young juvenile Bigfoot. I was shocked cause it was actually mimicking me eating my sandwich,” Alexander said. “It looked strangely human.”

Before this encounter, Alexander says she didn’t have an opinion one way or the other on whether Bigfoots were real or not. She found Rugg on the Internet and contacted him.

“It was absolutely insane. I thought this was kind of weird, like, I don’t know, a Bigfoot near downtown Santa Cruz. I talked to Michael and he told me about other people that had sightings in the area,” Alexander said.

Rugg hears stories like this every day. He’s heard so many, he’s altered his theories on the intelligence capacity of Bigfoots.

“It doesn’t seem logical that a dumb ape could be so adept at hiding and so aware of us and our relationship to them,” Rugg says.

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